Adam's Woods (6 page)

“Yep, let’s go,” he said, with more confidence than he felt. Being here, actually going inside, brought a tightness to his chest and he hoped the faint tremor of his hands wasn't noticeable. If not for the cathartic experience of remembering Adam’s death before this, he doubted he could walk into the house without breaking down.

“We don’t have to do this now, Eric.”

He started at her words, heard the concern, wondered how she knew when he thought he was covering his real feelings respectably. Maybe it was a female thing but he suspected something more: perhaps childhood friends could always see through each other, that they’d gotten in on the ground floor before the custom installation of defense mechanisms, a poker face, and flat out bullshit necessary for admittance into adulthood. Because despite her confident smile and self-possession, obviously a woman with internal strength, he could catch glimpses of the small girl peeking out through the wire-rimmed frames. He could tell she was nervous, too. Whether it was because of him, or because of the house and its ghosts, he didn’t know.

“Now’s as good a time as any. Let’s do it.”

He followed her onto the porch, hearing the creak of the swing that had hung from two large eye bolts from which the ceiling still bore scars, past an old lawn mower to the right where the bikes used to be, and was struck with the stifling heat emanating from the door that opened into the living room. August again. It had been warm but tolerable outside, but the house was an oven in comparison.

“I’m sorry about the heat,” she said.“I got here a little early to open the windows, but it doesn’t seem to have helped.”

As he stepped into the room, he forgot about the temperature, was enveloped by remembered sights and smells and sounds that came in a rush, as though the house itself greeted him, saying,
Eric! Remember this?And what about the time you...

There was sadness too, because so many of the memories came with Adam attached. But he found a new ability to separate them from his death and enjoy them for their content alone. He now realized that in fixing Adam's entire existence on that one point, he had also denied any celebration of Adam’s life.

“Eric? Do you want me to leave you alone for a while? I could sit out in the truck if you like. There’s air conditioning in there, so you wouldn’t have to twist my arm.”

She grinned with the comment, and he smiled back, so glad that it was Mary here with him and not a stranger who couldn’t understand the root of his peculiar reactions. With exceptions of course. If JT...or John Thomas had answered the phone, he probably would have been back in Pittsburgh by now reconsidering not only his position on celibacy but on getting sloppy drunk.

“No, Mary, I’d like you to stay. If you want to go out, that’s fine, but don’t go on my account.”

“Okay, but I sort of feel useless here, because you know this house better than me. The paint job is fairly new, the carpet isn’t, and the furniture comes with it, if you want it. I put most of this stuff in here, I admit, and I know it’s not much but to be honest this house has been on the market for almost two years and I’d despaired of ever selling it, so anything to sweeten the deal, right? If the couch and end tables look like they came from yard sales, it’s because they did. The easy chair came from my house. I threw out the husband but kept his chair, but I didn’t really want it. It’s not that old and you’re welcome to it. If you would decide to buy the house, I mean.”

“So you were married? I guess with the sign saying Collins, I assumed...”

“Yes, I was married, for almost five years. Until I caught the bastard with his co-worker in a motel working a little overtime. No children, thank goodness, and I took back my maiden name as soon as I changed the bed sheets. How about you? Any past, present, or future Mrs. Kane?”

Did he see interest there, beyond polite conversation, or was it the novelists’ imagination trying to direct the plot? Because, if being honest with himself, even at this time and in this place, he was feeling a wee bit smitten.

“No. I never even got close. Not to say that I wouldn’t, but I’m pretty okay with my career right now, and don’t want to have someone there just to have them, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. Experience is a tough teacher.” She smiled wanly, and for a moment he got a glimpse of the damage done to her heart, the glib comments like spackle that could fill the cracks but never heal them entire. And he reasoned that the tough girl persona was a more or less recent addition.

The house was in decent condition, certainly livable, and the furniture a bonus. He’d begun to think about occupation, and decided he wouldn’t live here year round, would keep his apartment in Pittsburgh and maybe do summers. At least until he had gotten what he came for, or found there was nothing more to be had. It occurred to him that he had made a decision to buy.

“Do you want to go upstairs?” Mary asked.

“Sure,” he answered, though it wasn’t really necessary.

He followed Mary up the steps, the stairs creaking under his feet, and being the creator of the dread sound instead of the victim under the blankets fascinated him. He imagined himself the murderer, tried to understand his motive and purpose for the sake of the story. He visualized a terrified little boy up in his room, but then without meaning to visualized another boy standing by the swamp and peering down at a bullfrog that thought itself well hid under some duckweed, imagined the heft and balance of the blade in his hand on the approach. He began to feel sick and stopped the exercise, not only because it was too real, but because he simply couldn’t come up with any motive that made sense. He could make something up for his tale, had already been doing that, but had never understood why someone would kill Adam.

Killing was nothing new, Cain slaying Abel and rolling on from there, but at least there were generally understandable catalysts, even normal ambitions and emotions extrapolated and taken to the extreme; possession of a woman, power, money, jealousy, hatred, even love. And then there was war, the grandest murderer of them all, started usually over a piece of land that in a hundred years anyone who fought for the right to plant their flag there would be fertilizing its soil, if not already. But killing children, aside from perhaps a severe mental illness, didn’t make sense to Eric at all; simply terrible business, abhorrent to anyone with even the most rudimentary moral compass.

Sometimes he feared that there was a hell waiting for him. But other times he prayed it was so - his own soul be damned - to ensure the infinite roasting of the vilest humans that walked the earth, with the child-killers front and center. In these moment’s he hoped Adam’s murderer dead from a method as painful as possible, and now spinning slowly on an eternal spit over eternal flames.

“Oh, I forgot to mention this, Eric. The bed in your old bedroom is actually your old bed. I guess it’s just been left here through the successive owners...not that there were that many.” He heard Mary’s voice and it took a moment to place it.

“Eric?”

He rounded the corner at the top of the stairs and stepped into his old bedroom, and sure enough the bed sat just where it did in the corner, the only piece of furniture, the only piece of anything, in the room. His father, a furniture maker, had left it and other items he could build, so that their flight would end in as new of a land as possible. But he had never expected to find it still here. It felt surreal, like it had been waiting for him. And with glee and foreboding he knew he would sleep there, probably with his feet dangling out over the end.

He focused on Mary, took in her slightly bemused, slightly concerned expression, and said, “I’m sorry, Mary. Being back in here, it’s like one of those old sitcoms, where all the stuff is piled up inside a closet. When I walked through the door, I opened up that closet and got caught in the avalanche. It’s just taking me some time to dig my way out while looking at all the cool stuff I forgot I had.”

“What a neat description. So vivid. I have to admit I like that better than the one you wrote where the guy gets his head ripped off in all its gory detail.”

“So you really did read my books, although you’d have to be more specific about which head you’re talking about.”

“
Ugh. I think I’m done with
that
subject,” she said with a grimace, but winked to indicate she wasn’t as put off as she pretended. “But sitcoms. Now that you brought those up, I can’t help but remember what we used to watch, before some crazy lady with eight kids going shopping and getting a haircut qualified as entertainment. How about Family Ties and Growing Pains?”

“Diff’rent Strokes...Happy Days,” he countered.

They launched into a discussion of television’s glory days, which segued into a full-blown review of the eighties in general, and somewhere between leg warmers and White Lion he told her that he would be buying the house.

Entranced with Mary and looking forward to more of her company, he followed the truck with the magnets out of Lincoln Corners en route to Drake City for lunch. She planned to get the ball rolling on the paperwork that afternoon. Eric would write a check for the whole amount, which would speed up the process.

“I don’t think I’ve ever sold a house that was paid in full,” she had said, maybe with a little awe in her voice, and Eric savored the little thrill that came with impressing the girl he grew up with. Tiny village boy makes good...or something like that.

The scant fifteen-minute drive to their destination surprised Eric. But then, when not waiting on a stopped school bus for every farm kid living on every back road along the way, it made perfect sense.

The old man parted the curtain and strained to see who stood in the driveway of the Kane place, so-called despite lacking Kanes for over twenty years. But what else could it be called? He knew Mary’s truck but not the car parked behind it. Curious as to whether she’d finally found a buyer, he went to his study to retrieve the binoculars he used to identify birds out on his walks. Positioned by the window again, he put them to his eyes to find that they’d gone inside. He licked his dry lips and thought about a glass of water, but feared if he did the vehicles would be gone when he got back.

He sat and waited, sweating in the heat and trying not to think of the drink, the desire for which had increased ten-fold once denied. The window air-conditioning unit rattled in place, doing its best but no match for this day. He felt nervous and irritable, telling himself that his failing eyes had played a trick on him, that when they came back out he’d see that the man with Mary was a perfect stranger. His legs began to feel stiff, so he risked pulling up a chair to the window and sitting down. Soon he was dozing, his head dropping down to his chest only to jerk back up, then repeating the process. Of all the negative consequences of original sin, he thought, getting old and feeble had to top the list. But no. He knew of worse things, over-familiar companions that would never leave him.

He finally saw motion in the porch and put the binoculars to his eyes again. His heartbeat accelerated sharply and he felt faint. Standing next to Mary, very close he couldn’t help but notice, was George Kane, but George Kane of twenty years ago when... as he willed his hands still and looked more closely, he could make out differences in his build. Fit but not as thickly muscled as George, and taller. The light brown hair was the same, and his wide smile and slightly flattened nose similar, but the mouth was Maggie’s, unfortunately feminine for a child but an asset on a man that put stock in those things. So it had to be Eric, his son.

His surviving son.

He had always liked Eric, had even read some of his stories, shocked by the violence but impressed with the same sharp mind he recalled, still evident in the depth of the characters and their moral and philosophical quandaries. Just that a lot of gore had to be hosed off to see it clearly. And he also saw a man struggling desperately within those pages.

He watched them get into their vehicles and drive away, and told himself that Eric had been in the area and wanted to see the old place. With that particular itch scratched, he would already be heading back home. Pittsburgh, he thought it was. He refused to consider that he’d actually been looking to buy. It wouldn’t change anything, but would make it all so much harder to have to see and talk to him. He felt wetness on his cheeks and wiped it away brusquely with his sleeve.

Stop it. You made your bed, now lie in it.

He did go to his bed and lay down, exhausted, and troubled at the presence of Eric in Lincoln Corners, whether he planned to stay or not. A mind could grow used to about anything, given enough time to adjust. As long as nothing entered from the outside that challenged its right to be. Eric introduced that variable, and despite feeling the weariness in his marrow, he lay awake under a rattling ceiling fan for a long time, staring at the past.